Specializing in what… like… kinda matters since 2012.

“Keep Your Ear on the Moving Target: Pop and The National”

The New Pornographers, now, with Together, may have created pop music to transcend the visceral. The truths of an aging, vulnerable person are always boring, though, which is why we root for the Michael Stipes and Carl Newmans, and gloss over the R.E.M. lyrics that are like, “I want everything now”, and “We’ll show the kids how to do it fine, fine, fine”. There’s a reason why Mogwai, an excellent band, make a habit of putting out instrumentals — they know better than to think they can pull one over on us.

There was recently a New Yorker article about a situation of Matt Berninger of The National, and the move-in of a brother to a home of the wife’s and his. The meaningful moments about, too, in the music. More than ever it resembles a sweet syrup, which is exactly what America needs right now, all the visceral infrastructures of genre having been enacted. It takes a precious situation today to spawn vital sound wave euphoria, as, perhaps, it always has.